The present invention relates to techniques for combining sound materials and audibly generating tones or musical sounds on the basis of the combined sound materials.
Heretofore, there have been known technique for prestoring a multiplicity of fragmentary sound materials in a database and selectively combining some of the prestored sound materials to generate tones (i.e., tone waveforms) on the basis of the combined sound materials. Individual sound materials to be used for generation of tones are selected from among the multiplicity of sound materials prestored in the database. To facilitate the selection of the sound materials, the multiplicity of sound materials stored in the database are classified into categories indicative of various musical characters or features. Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2010-191337 discloses a technique for extracting a plurality of sound materials from continuous sound waveforms of a multiplicity of music pieces, classifying the extracted sound materials into various categories and then storing the thus-classified sound materials into a database.
A sound generation style in which tones are to be audibly generated using some of the sound materials stored in the database is determined in advance, for example, by a user or the like defining sound materials to be used for the sound generation and sound generation timing of the sound materials. Therefore, the user has to determine as many combinations of the sound materials and sound generation timing as the number of tones to be audibly generated or sounded. Thus, the longer a music piece to be created by the user setting a multiplicity of combinations of sound materials and sound generation timing, the greater would become an amount of operation to be performed by the user.
A long music piece may contain a portion where a particular sound generation style (or sound generation content) of a predetermined time period is to be repetitively audibly generated or sounded. In such a case, a user may sometimes simplify the necessary operation by copying combinations of sound materials and sound generation timing of that portion and applying the copied combinations to another time period of the music piece. However, applying such a mere copy may undesirably result in monotonousness of the music piece.
To avoid such an inconvenience, the user may sometimes attempt to change impression of the copied portion of the music piece without greatly changing a progressing flow of the music piece. In such a case, the user, in effect, changes the types of the sound materials to be sounded (i.e., target sound materials) without changing the sound generation timing. However, because there is a need to change the types of all of the target sound materials, this approach would end up failing to achieve simplification of the operation.